With the growth and commercialization of global computer networks, such as, for example, the Internet, delivery of advertisements over a computer network has become commonplace. Much of the content on the Internet is located on the World Wide Web, the often graphical portion of the Internet, which has become one of the most popular venue for accessing information. A user visiting a content site, which is a node on the computer network, and viewing an advertisement, known in the industry as a “creative,” is often invited to select the advertisement, e.g., by clicking on the creative such as an ad banner. Many creatives contain click-thru code in addition to the advertisement comprised of graphic and/or text. Click-thru code automatically redirects the user to another network site when the user clicks on the creative. Thus, upon selecting a particular advertisement, the user is typically redirected to another network site associated with the particular advertisement.
To assess effectiveness of an advertisement or a campaign, it is often desirable to gather some information about the advertisement viewed and/or selected by a particular user. In conventional systems, the number of times the particular user views a particular advertisement is typically tracked. The number of times the particular user selects the particular advertisement is also typically tracked in the conventional systems.
For more thorough assessment of effectiveness of an advertisement or a campaign, however, it is desirable to monitor and track not only the number of times each advertisement has been viewed or selected by a user, but also the transactions of the user while visiting the redirected network site. For example, purchases made by the user while at the redirected network site may be important for compiling user statistics such as spending habits, as well as for measuring ad effectiveness.
Further, advertising rates charged by a content site to advertisers, in many instances, are at least partly based on the effectiveness of the advertisements on the content site. Thus, any monitoring or tracking of user transactions at the network site being monitored should ensure that the user has been redirected to the network site, at least initially, by the advertisements viewed and selected at the content site.
Therefore, it is desirable for a content site to monitor and/or track transactions by a user redirected from the content site to the network site.